Stream: James Blake, “I Only Know (What I Know Now)”

Today James Blake releases his Klavierwerke EP, the super-anticipated follow-up to CMYK. When we spoke to him for our Gen F in FADER 69, he told us, "CMYK was the EP where I've gone through those moments in R&B that everyone remembers subconsciously. The second EP is where I got really bored of doing that and wanted to sample my own voice and feel like I was part of the production instead. I've sampled my own voice before, but these tracks are really introspective. They're recordings of me playing piano and singing at home in Enfield on my own. It definitely has its own place in time." And listening to "I Only Know (What I Know Now)," it sounds like we got to tunnel in a wormhole into Blake's brain, where he let us curl up fetally in a sleeping bag and warm up by the fires of his Enfield voice, beats crackling all around, the embers to the flame. This man's got a preternatural grasp of beauty that sidesteps the conventions of genre and spears straight to to the aorta. He's like some sort of super-evolved human, speaking via telepathy.